My Three Blogging Platforms

I've been meaning to post a blog on Disaboom since I joined but I honestly have not had that "blog light" come on inside my brain that tells me "this is blog material" on something that I am mulling over. I actually love to blog and like many bloggers, I love to see my blogs get high ratings and to see the number of subscribers to my blogs be constantly on the rise. That, my friends, is the highest honor and degree of satisfaction anybody could ever make to me (and most others) as a true hard-core Internet blogger. You see, I am competitive in nature, always aiming for the top spot in the areas of my expertise. And blogging, while perhaps not my best venture since I never was any good at English, has always been fun because I get to break all of the grammar rules since it is my blogging style. Mrs. Stewart, are you reading this? LOL

When you see a blog from me, it comes from my heart. My mind is non-stop on thoughts and processing, although for a brief period prior to my MELAS diagnosis in 2005 and ever since, jumbled thoughts and flawed processing have been a real problem that I deal with daily. Here lately, I find myself struggling to get coherent thoughts down on paper. In the past 6 months, my wife has noticed a more distanced and confused husband as my hearing continues to deteriorate and that summa *** laude grad student slowly loses more of those "smarts" that kept me competitive in an ever increasingly difficult dog-eat-dog professional engineering environment. I have seen that competitive edge become more important in just about all of the jobs from "blue collar" to "white collar" positions. As companies everywhere downsize to cut costs, the employees that remain are the ones that always had the abilities to carry the extra load. Yup, times are tough, budgets are tight and the workload is ever increasing.

Oops... I'm starting to go off-topic but in the above paragraph, I do see some good blog material for future blogs. Thank God I'm not as brain-dead as I felt an hour ago!

For those of you that have some extra time on your hands and want to see where I've come from over the past few years, I have two main blogging platforms where you can find my preexisting blogs. Over time, Disaboom will become my third blogging platform. As it turns out, these three platforms cover three distinct areas of their own so I will have no trouble deciding what to put where. As I see it now, I will be blogging for 3 specific reasons. That breakdown will be as follows.

1. My original blogging platform was my own website where since 1999, I have had an online ministry called David and Theresa Ministries (DATM). From 1999 to the end of 2006, my website served over 13,500 unique visitors with countless needs. During 2005, when I had to stop working as a professional engineer due to my declining health, my website has started to evolve into a "final chapter" for the story of my life. I now primarily help people that find my website because they, like my family and I, are somehow touched by this terrible degenerative and ultimately fatal neuromuscular disorder that I have. I have been blogging about my life since diagnosis here.

2. A little over a year ago, I started another blog at a Christian website that allows churches to stay in touch with their congregation throughout the week as well as to allow Christians all over the world to be friends in the vast social network that is part of the same website. I periodically post blogs on that website known as "MyChurch.org" and those blogs can be found here.

3. Finally, ever since I found out about Disaboom two months ago, I have known that this is the website that I have been waiting for to blog about my thoughts on PWDs in the workforce, Social Security, the ADA of 1990 and lots more. Until Disaboom's launch, I had not found a good place to blog about and for people with disabilities (PWDs). This site is so comprehensive and far reaching, I am positive that it will be my platform of choice for my blogs that I want to write on this subject matter. Thank you Disaboom!

Sooooo... This is my first blog for Disaboom which lays the foundation for what you'll find in all of my blogs here. You will not find the "very religious stuff" that I blog about elsewhere because that is not what this website is about. You will also not find too much about my specific life in my Disaboom blog because, after all, I do have my own website that I need to keep alive. My "DATM" website is one of the many things that keeps me looking forward to tomorrow.

Here at my Disaboom blog, what you will find are my thoughts that dive deeply in to medicine, politics and/or our rights as it applies to folks affected by my rare hereditary disorder known as MELAS. I do hope that what I write will always be positive, uplifting, suggestions for solutions to serious problems and anything else that proves that a disability is NOT a reason to think that your life is over (or never got started if you see it that way). No, a disability is your opportunity to show your ABILITY to make a difference for yourself and others in a positive and forward moving manner. You and I, together, can and will make a difference!

Your friend and fellow Disaboomer,

Dave